Box Brings Intelligence to Cloud Content Management

Box, Inc., a leader in cloud content management, today announced that it is bringing advanced image recognition capabilities to enterprise content through an integration with Google Cloud Vision. Available today in private beta, the integration represents one of Box’s first use cases of advanced machine learning to help enterprises improve workflows and drive efficiencies through more accurate discovery and deeper insights into unstructured content stored in Box.

"Organizations today have no way to extract insights from the massive amounts of unstructured data that are essential to their business, missing a huge opportunity to drive innovation, efficiency, and cost savings," said Aaron Levie, cofounder and CEO, Box. "By combining the machine learning capabilities of Google Cloud with the critical data businesses manage and secure in Box, we are enabling our customers – for the first time – to unlock tremendous new value from their content, digitize manual workflows, and accelerate business processes."

Images are the second fastest growing type of business content in Box, but their value has remained largely untapped. Leveraging Google Cloud Vision’s machine learning capabilities, Box customers can surface insights from images by detecting individual objects and concepts, capture text through optical character recognition (OCR), automatically add keyword labels to images for faster search & filtering, and easily build metadata on image catalogs to automate business processes and speed up workflows across every industry.

"Box’s application of Google Cloud’s machine learning APIs brings to life the potential of AI in the enterprise," said Fei-Fei Li, Chief Scientist, Google Cloud AI and Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University. "Understanding images remains a challenge for businesses and Box’s application of the Vision API demonstrates how the accessibility of machine learning models can unlock potential within a business’s own data. Ultimately it will democratize AI for more people and businesses."

State-of-the-art Machine Learning for the Enterprise

Image recognition using Google Cloud Vision enables Box customers to revolutionize how they manage images and streamline image-based workflows, simply and securely, across their extended enterprise. For example, they can:

• Accelerate the detection of quality control issues by making it easier to ingest, tag and search images.
• Enhance team collaboration by making all of a project’s content, including whiteboard photos and hand written notes, available in a single search stream.
• Increase marketing operations by creating digital asset management (DAM) repositories, organized by metadata and saved searches.
• Streamline hiring and on-boarding by having candidates upload a picture of a driver’s license to Box, which detects the information on it, triggering an automatic background check.
• Improve customer application processing by enabling customers to scan or take pictures of forms and automatically initiate workflows.

"Box’s approach to machine learning and image recognition empowers enterprises to derive value from otherwise unstructured data," said Wayne Kurtzman, Research Director, Social and Experiential Solutions at IDC. "By extending their multi-partner approach to their intelligence strategy, Box is leveraging machine learning techniques to deliver customers with a powerful new benefit: Make image files easily searchable and more usable, saving time and increasing the value of and ability to collaborate on visual assets."